Friday, August 16, 2013

Just because I fell into the same trap twice, once when trying kdump a year ago, now when working on systemtap, a short reminder for everyone:

If you want to do something that needs kernel-default-debuginfo installed (like, say, "kdump"/"crash" or "systemtap"), then make sure that you also have kernel-default-devel-debuginfo on your system.

The reason for this is, that the kernel-default-debuginfo package has only the debuginfo for the kernel modules, but it misses the debuginfo for /boot/vmlinux. This debuginfo is in kernel-default-devel-debuginfo package.

This is at least strange, since the vmlinux binary is not in the devel package but in the main kernel package.But in practice it does not matter if this is a bug or not: you need both debuginfo packages installed to make kdump analysis with "crash" or systemtap work.

Kernel 3.11rc has fixed the mei driver suspend problem for me. It brought another quirk, however. ExpressCard hotplug does not work anymore with my trusty old Thinkpad X200s. I need this to use my USB3 card. With 3.11 it only works if it is already plugged in during boot.To be honest, this has never been 100% automatic before: I always needed to manually load the "pciehp" module to get the slot to work. The other possible driver, "acpiphp" refused to load.With 3.11, both the acpiphp and the pciehp drivers can no longer be built as modules but are both built in statically.In addition, now the acpiphp driver claims to support my slot, which it in fact does not, but it still claims the slot and prevents the pciehp driver (which is initialized later) from working. The kernel hackers are working to fix up this mess, but it is probably not going to "just" work in 3.11, so for now the way to get the ExpressCard slot working on a Thinkpad X200s is to pass the boot option